1. Technical Field
Disclosed embodiments relate generally to communication methods and systems, in particular systems and methods that allow communication and visitation services between remote users.
2. Background
There are many situations where regular communication between people or monitoring of situations can provide benefits. For example, in a business environment, it is helpful to have regular meetings with people involved with a project to ensure progress is being made. For some of those meetings, regular on-going communication is helpful and in some instances it is more helpful to be physically present during the communication so that the meeting is more interactive and so that attendees may be able to benefit from visual cues made by participant. However, it is not always possible to be physically present and other types of communications, such as audio, text or video conferencing may be able to provide a suitable alternative to being physically present.
In a health care environment, such as when a patient is in a hospital, family members are usually interested in visiting them. However, it is not always possible for family members to visit. Some family members may be very far from the hospital and cannot travel to visit. Some family members may not be able to visit during the specific visiting hours and may have to forego a visit. Audio communications, such as phone calls may be made but sometimes other types of communication with the patient may be more helpful. Having a phone conversation with visitors requires a good understanding of how use the features of your phone or setting up a conference call. Video communications over a computer or digital phone may also be made, but the ability of the patient to manipulate controls of a computer or phone may be limited due to their physical condition. The complexity of having the patient control the conversation with prior art devices increases as multiple parties want to communicate with the patient at the same time. Having different types of communications with the patient makes coordinating the conversations even more difficult.
In addition to visiting a patient in a hospital, visitors may be interested in monitoring the patient even outside of the visiting hour period without interrupting the patient. The visitors may also be interested in having a communication amongst themselves without interrupting or sharing these discussions with the patient.
From the patient's point of view, with the difficulty they may have in manipulating the devices and interfaces to establish multiple types of communications, patients may be interested in pre-defining a user profile that can provide an authorization for the different types of communications.
Accordingly, what is needed are methods and systems that provide consolidated remote communications and visitations features that address the shortcoming found in the prior art.